Introduction
In the summer of 2022, I was employed for several months as a Project Researcher at Tesi, a Finnish state-owned investing company. I was attached to a team making investments in Finnish and international venture capital and private equity funds. The team’s director, Sampo (names of individuals are pseudonyms), believed that the evaluation processes by which Tesi assesses the management teams of funds seeking investment from Tesi was one of the most important parts of their work. It had nonetheless remained relatively informal—in practice an almost artisanal, craft-like process to which experienced investment managers developed their own idiosyncratic approaches. I was to understand the existing process using ethnographic methods and to propose how it might be improved and systematized.
I found the context of team evaluation to be characterized by a tension between the kind of knowledge considered most legitimate by investors in theory—quantitative, universal, and objective—and the kind of knowledge they considered useful in practice: qualitative insights drawing on personal relationships developed over time with investment prospects. This was an epistemological friction which my investor colleagues addressed through “para-ethnographic” practices, a term coined by Holmes and Marcus to describe how experts in technocratic contexts also work with qualitative and interpretive knowledge “in the shadow of [their] formal knowledge work” (2008, 596). Nonetheless, they were ambivalent about the validity and legitimacy of this para-ethnographic knowledge.
In this case study I propose that professional ethnographers can help more fully resolve such frictions by bringing qualitative knowledge work out of the shadow and integrate it as an additional dimension of formal knowledge work. They can provide theoretical and methodological frameworks for legitimizing such existing but relatively tacit knowledge work practices, turning these into ethnographic intelligence. This is the capacity of all humans—not just credentialled social scientists—to work deliberately and reflexively with interpretive, social, contextual and qualitative knowledge. Such an intervention creates value for our collaborators while also helping to establish the value and legitimacy of our own work as qualitatively focused researchers.
In what follows I present my work with Tesi as an example of resolving epistemological frictions and turning para-ethnography into ethnographic intelligence. I begin with an account of what team evaluation entailed, what investors thought was important about it, and some of their concerns about its social and qualitative nature. I then describe the background to my own involvement, how director Sampo understood the problem I was to resolve, and how I began my work with a team initially cautious about the changes my intervention might bring. I explain the concrete products I created and how these addressed the problems faced by the team. Finally, I expand on the notion of ethnographic intelligence as a something expert ethnographers can support our clients and colleagues in developing.
Investors as Uneasy Ethnographers
Around the second half of my time at Tesi I had the opportunity to join two of my colleagues, investment director Kalevi and then investment associate Taavi, in the process of conducting due diligence interviews with the partners of a fund seeking investment from Tesi, a fund I pseudonymize here as Grove Equity. Kalevi and Taavi brought me up to speed with existing discussions with the fund, and together we planned the questions and topics our interviews would cover. Based on their meetings so far, my colleagues outlined some of their key concerns. The three Grove Equity partners were at very different stages of their career, with a clear hierarchy between them—one which Taavi had observed, among other things, based on the order in which they spoke at meetings. Taavi and Kalevi also felt that there remained some tension, defensiveness even, in the relationship with Tesi. My colleagues’ concerns reflected what they told me were two of the most important factors in the process of team evaluation: establishing trust and understanding team dynamics.
By this time in the project, I had established a good rapport with the funds team, who generously encouraged my participation in the Grove Equity case. The evaluation of the Grove Equity management team also coincided with the development of what would become one of my key deliverables—a team evaluation template and marking rubric—an initial version of which we were testing out as we made sense of the prospective investment. Subsequent sections provide more detail on my relationship with the Tesi team and the deliverables I produced. Here, I use the Grove Equity case to show what team evaluation was all about, and the epistemological friction it entailed.
The interviews with the Grove Equity partners were held over the course of a day in a meeting room at their offices in central Helsinki, beginning with a kick-off meeting including all the partners. My presence had by now become a staple of introductory small talk—Kalevi jokingly reassuring our counterparts that my anthropological attention was on scrutinizing Tesi’s team evaluation practices, rather than the Grove Equity partners. He began the substantive discussion by emphasizing that the Tesi team was not there to ask any trick questions, but to take an earnest interest in the fund partners and their investment practice. Kalevi asked them what their impression of Tesi had been so far, to which the most senior partner emphasized their appreciation for Tesi’s active, systematic and critical scrutiny, saying they have nothing to hide and much to learn from the process.
The greater part of the day at Grove Equity was spent in individual interviews with the three partners, each discussion lasting about an hour and a half. Much of their content was about the hard substance and practical concerns to do with running an investment fund: issues such as whether the team had sufficient expertise and prior experience and whether the fund was adequately staffed in relation to workload. But much interest was also taken in the personal and the social: discussing career plans and motivations, as well as relationships with the other partners. My colleagues Taavi and Kalevi took turns running the interviews, leaving the others free to take notes and make observations and interpretations, such as about themes around which the interviewee seemed relaxed and confident, or more tense and hesitant.
A few days later back in the Tesi offices, Taavi, Kalevi and I met to reflect on the fruits of the interviews. My colleagues were pleased about what had felt like a collaborative and open atmosphere. “It felt like we got to hear the real opinions, not just the script”, Taavi remarked—sharing his interpretation that our interviews had got us well beyond the slick sales pitch made by the fund the first time they met with Tesi. Still, Taavi and Kalevi remained concerned about differences in seniority and personal wealth between the partners, and how these might shape their decision-making processes and commitments to the success of the fund.
My colleague Taavi held a degree in finance, while Kalevi had degrees in law and economics—typical backgrounds for Finnish finance professionals. But in the process described above, they applied not just their formal education, but worked as para-ethnographers drawing on skills learnt on the job and as apprentices to more senior professionals. Taavi also spoke with interest of his minor in social psychology, while team leader Sampo mentioned to me how it was his high school courses in religious studies and psychology that he had found among the most useful in his professional work.
Despite their para-ethnographic methods and recognition of their utility, however, this kind of knowledge found limited representation in the formal documents by which professionals like Taavi and Kalevi typically made their case to the broader funds team, to senior management and to the board of directors. These were PowerPoint slide decks packed with detailed charts and graphs elucidating the quantitative and technical side of due diligence, with just a few slides about the management team of the prospective investment. What my colleagues had explained to me as the most crucial aspects of team evaluation—team dynamics and trust—had scarcely any representation. There was no discussion of trust at all, and the term “team dynamics” itself appeared only once in a slide about diversity that had been recently added to the investment proposal template.
Meanwhile, in interviews my investor colleagues expressed ambivalence about the para-ethnographic dimensions of their work. One dimension of this ambivalence was apparent in the term “social porn” (sosiaaliporno) which my colleagues used to refer to industry gossip. The term expressed a sense of unease that concern with such information could seem like indulging an unprofessional appetite for social drama. However, what might be trivialized as “gossip” could also be vitally important information for team evaluation. For example, an offhand remark at a dinner by some junior analyst could raise red flags that—upon further investigation—lead to evidence of inappropriate behavior towards colleagues or even of a criminal record of which more formal due diligence activities had found no trace of. Such information is of obvious importance to a prudent investment manager concerned with managing risks and avoiding social conflicts that could derail the work of the prospective fund’s management team.
Another of my Tesi colleagues was fond of referring to what they did in team evaluation as a kind of “armchair psychology” (keittiöpsykologia, literally “kitchen psychology”). For professionals more comfortable with the certainty of hard numbers, the term reflected an anxiety about making high stakes decisions based on ultimately uncertain and contingent interpretations about the inner lives and motivations of other people. They felt a professional responsibility to make reasonable and fair interpretations—indeed not unlike how many academic ethnographers are anxious about their responsibility to interlocutors. One colleague shared her reflections:
How does each of us, with our different educational backgrounds and experiences, yet largely all trained as engineers or business people, how do we as people of hard sciences and numbers make assessments as armchair psychologists? It’s a real soft spot. I think of what an injustice we are doing each time we assess people and come to our conclusions […]
The same colleague also shared a complaint that, despite their insistence on the importance of team dynamics specifically, the external consultants they had worked with had all nonetheless focused on rating individuals and their competencies. Individual competency was not the problem, she explained, but rather: how do these individuals get along with each other when things go wrong?
Many investors spoke also of the importance of “gut feeling”: professional intuition honed through years of experience, which helps guide the development of a more explicitly articulated investment case. Yet even when substantially argued, investors feel some ambivalence about the lingering, not insignificant role of intuition. This I heard from many investors, beyond my colleagues at Tesi (also discussed in scholarship, e.g. Huang 2018; Lenhard 2021; Zaloom 2003). One British investor remarked that “the slightly unspoken truth is that you make gut decisions”, reflecting this uncertainty about the validity of intuition as a legitimate basis for analysis. But even intuition was something diligently cultivated by investors, not simply pulled out of thin air. For example, the same investor spoke of the importance of para-ethnographic practices such as visiting the prospective investment’s offices to “sniff it out” and ask yourself, “how does it feel?” [my emphasis].
These all reflect concerns shared within the funds team that the kind of qualitative knowledge that they rely upon in team evaluation is first, somehow dubious or insufficient as a form of knowledge, and second, that they lack the skills or methods to work with such knowledge in a rigorous enough way, using merely the amateur intuition of an armchair psychologist—even when in fact applying years of experience and building a track record of successful evaluations. Meanwhile, it seemed that “gut feeling” might be glossing quite sophisticated para-ethnographic knowledge work, all lumped into the ambivalent category of intuition due to the absence of a fuller shared language with which it might be worked with in more detail and regarded as legitimate knowledge alongside more technical analysis. Nonetheless, investors shared a unanimous understanding that this was all very important: understanding team dynamics and establishing trust were the most important part of team evaluation, which in turn was the most important part of due diligence.
I call this an epistemological friction—a contradiction between the kind of knowledge considered legitimate and the kind of knowledge understood as most useful. Such frictions, I suggest, often lead to para-ethnographic practices by professionals who nonetheless feel ambivalent about these same practices. The concrete deliverables I created would be aimed at solving this epistemological friction. But first it is important to understand how I came to this project at Tesi, and how the funds team itself understood the problem I was to address. What I saw was an epistemological friction, but what were the practical problems faced by the organization that such an analysis could help solve?
Background and Methods
I was introduced to the head of the funds team via an acquaintance I had made as part of my PhD research on Finnish startup and investing professionals. Sampo was already somewhat familiar with anthropology, having collaborated with another Cambridge-based anthropologist who studies venture capital and is active in the industry. He thus reasoned that an anthropologist could be the right kind of expert to bring into his team to tackle a problem that had been on his agenda for some time.
Sampo told me that for the past five years he had worked to standardize the funding team’s practices. He was driven by a belief that as a public sector company, Tesi should provide a reliable standard quality of service to its stakeholders, such as the funds it invests in. Their experience of the organization should not be excessively determined by the particular investment manager they work with—nor should Tesi find itself excessively reliant on the personal relationships formed by individual professionals. Sampo described team evaluation as the one “missing piece” in this project. As a practice it was something of a “black box” without a clearly articulated method shared among the team. The more senior investment managers had developed distinct approaches through their long experience. More junior employees worked with different senior managers and were thus exposed to different approaches, gradually developing their own. It was not necessarily a problem, Sampo explained, that there were diverse approaches—the challenge was rather in how these approaches and the understandings and relationships they generated could be better shared within the team. Part of this problem was a lack of documentation, which slowed down the training of new junior analysts and made handing over relationships between managers difficult. Sampo had also made an observation akin to my analysis of an epistemological friction: despite the importance of team evaluation, board meetings where investment proposals were presented saw precious little discussion about the prospective team.
Beyond outlining his view of the problem, Sampo gave me a free hand in how to develop a solution and what kind of deliverables to eventually propose and produce. I set out first to understand the existing process of team evaluation and to get to know my new colleagues. I participated in the shared life of the team and company, hotdesking at whatever seat was available at the funds team corner of the office and chatting with my neighbors. I sat in on weekly meetings, joined lunches, and attended a series of onboarding sessions provided to all new employees. I also set about doing interviews with everyone in the funds team, asking them to explain the process of team evaluation and to share their thoughts on its current state. I warned my colleagues that my methods involve a degree of nosiness and proceeded to ask to join pretty much any external meetings I caught wind of—especially those with prospective funds or funds already managed by Tesi. In the case of Grove Equity I shared above, I was able to participate in the majority of the team evaluation process.
As I conducted my work I sensed some ambivalence about my intervention. My role and my project were, after all, highly unconventional. It was also clearly not the case that my colleagues had any practical trouble doing team evaluation well—to the contrary, they were very good at it. It made sense that they might see me as potential trouble: a strange outsider nonetheless given license to essentially tell them how to do their jobs better. I recall how one colleague in particular gladly engaged with me in in-depth discussions about the team evaluation process and the various challenges arising from its qualitative and social nature—and yet somehow also left me with the distinct impression that any development of the existing process was probably not necessary. From many of my colleagues, I sensed a wariness about rigid new processes and documentation requirements that would increase workload. There was perhaps a sense that team evaluation, as it was, functioned well precisely because the process lacked rigid structures and thus allowed for variety, flexibility and creativity in methods. The prospect of a new formalized process, meanwhile, could theoretically entail the imposition of one authoritative scheme that leaves little room for such diversity. Lack of existing formalization also meant that existing methods lacked full recognition as legitimate and could thus be vulnerable to outside intervention, including by myself.
Solution and Impact
As I spent more time with the funds team, wariness turned into collegiality. Soon I was being proactively invited me to meetings with funds, where my curious role as corporate anthropologist was happily utilized in initial small talk. I had not rushed to propose anything, instead spending ample time on listening to my colleagues concerns and understanding the process of team evaluation.
Doing so, I developed an understanding of the context in which I was to intervene: there was little need for me to intervene in how exactly my colleagues did team evaluation. Rather, my intervention should focus on giving representation to what they were doing and the insights they produced. I began creating two products to this end: an interview methods handbook and a new team evaluation template.
The most straightforward of these was the methods handbook, which brought together what I had learned from my investor colleagues about team evaluation and articulated it as a structured process. Here I also drew from my own training as a qualitative researcher trained in similar methods. The handbook included material on guiding principles and purposes, how to craft questions and hypotheses, types of questions, how to structure interviews, the importance of open-ended observation, paying attention to the context of the interview, tips and tricks for conducting interviews themselves, and about reflexivity and positionality.
A section on interpreting interview data discussed the nature of making arguments based on insights created from subjective assessment and emerging from specific social contexts—distinguishing this kind of argument from the “universal” and “objective”, “facts”’ which more numerical data was thought to represent. It encouraged a reflexive approach to one’s intuition and gut feelings in which one attempts to articulate them explicitly and turn them into examinable hypotheses. The handbook acknowledged that rigid structure was by no means the mark of a competent interview; that in fact informal, unstructured and spontaneous conversation and interaction with the investee team was important for building personal trust and sometimes crucial for producing unanticipated insights. The handbook also recognized the challenge of “social porn” as representing a category of knowledge that could be materially important, but that must be handled with sensitivity and professionalism. It suggested an approach in which the substance of such personal matters be recorded in a more generalized and abstract manner, while their implications for the likely performance of the fund be articulated in detail. The handbook draft was circulated among the team and finalized based on their feedback.
The team evaluation template was a slightly more complex product. In deference to concerns about bloated documentation, I sought to create something that would simply replace an existing “team evaluation” slide in the investment proposal template. My format took inspiration from how the team represented their ESG assessments of prospective funds, in which they described funds’ ESG practices and rated them on a four-point scale ranging from “excellent” to “weak”. A separate marking scheme indicated roughly what kind of ESG practices would qualify for each rating. It is notable that ESG evaluation represented an existing formal framework for working with qualitative knowledge, even as this knowledge did not emerge from as socially a complex and challenging process as team evaluation. Anthropologist and Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett (2021), indeed, has observed that the proliferation of ESG is leading business professionals to take a broader perspective that accounts for the context beyond numbers.
Thus, I sought to take advantage of how ESG evaluation had laid the ground for further qualitative knowledge work. I similarly created categories representing different aspects of team evaluation and indicated questions that should be asked about each aspect. I also produced a marking scheme similar in style to that used in ESG assessment. The categories, questions, and marking scheme were entirely based on what my investor colleagues had explained to me were the pertinent issues to team investing—my work was simply in organizing and structuring this knowledge. And thought a formal framework with scores, it was understood not to be a prescriptive tool, but rather a guide for thinking, arguing, and representing analysis.
Initial versions of these tools were put to the test in the Grove Equity case described earlier. The template’s section on “Decision Making” provided space to assess the significance, for example, of Taavi’s observations about deference and speaking turns among the partners, while the “Motivation” section would see an assessment of how the fund partners’ different career stages and differences in personal wealth might shape their commitment to the fund’s success. Meanwhile, the largely open and collaborative mood of the day of interviews would feed into the assessment of the “Relationship with Tesi”, both as brief written analysis and an overall rating of “Basic”. For the first time, matters of team dynamics and trust became objects of explicit written interpretation and evaluation, in documents that would make their way up to leadership and board meetings.
Three years later, at the time of writing, the products continue to be used in the team. They solved many of the practical challenges of team evaluation which Sampo and his colleagues had identified. This was not primarily by intervening in the methods of team evaluation, but by enabling a new way of relating to these methods and the knowledge they produced. These methods were no longer just implicit knowledge, professional intuition, or “armchair psychology”, but an explicitly articulated and justified knowledge work practice. They were no longer a “black box”—methods and insights were now both explicit. “Although it left leeway in how team evaluation was in fact done, the template forced our deal teams to articulate and argue about evaluated teams in the same language, which also significantly improved the rest of the funds team’s ability to challenge and engage with them”, Sampo reflected later to me in an email about the impact of the project. Taavi, meanwhile, explained that the tools allowed investors to explicitly argue an even greater proportion what might otherwise be seen as “gut feeling”.
The handbook created transparency, established shared principles, and enabled shared understanding of methods across the team—but without prescribing a specific approach. New junior analysts could now be efficiently onboarded. The investment proposal documents reviewed by and discussed in leadership team and board meetings now explicitly addressed important aspects of team evaluation such as trust and team dynamics. Concerns about “social porn” were met with an approach that combined professionalism with acknowledgement of the materiality of information about, for example, interpersonal social conflicts. Discussing the content of this paper with me, Taavi reflected that the term was now heard less often, suggesting that the project had helped dissipate the anxieties it represented.
From Para-Ethnography to Ethnographic Intelligence
To resolve the epistemological friction by enabling a more structured and articulated approach to qualitative knowledge work is not quite the same as turning these finance professionals into expert ethnographers, however. Reading a book on cognitive behavioral therapy will not make one a trained psychiatrist, but it can still be transformative in expanding the conceptual tools one has for reflecting upon one’s emotions, thoughts and behavior—in developing one’s emotional intelligence, as it were. Similarly, one need not be a credentialled social scientists to develop and apply one’s ethnographic intelligence.
As humans we are constantly creating, interpreting and using social, contextual and qualitative knowledge to make decisions and navigate everyday life. I would go as far as to say that this is by far the majority of the knowledge work that we do, sometimes more intuitively, sometimes with more self-awareness. Many educated business professionals, however, are socialized to modernist and positivist epistemologies that privilege technical, quantitative and objective ways of knowing. In the Finnish context, this may be seen partly an outcome of the high status of engineering and technical training, even for business students. Consider, for example, the great prestige of degrees in “Industrial Engineering and Management” (tuotantotalous). Such professionals likely see the interpretive, social, and qualitative knowledge they use elsewhere in their life as inadmissible in the contexts of formal knowledge work.
Compared to our use of such knowledge, the moments in which most of us can truly make decisions based on, say, some formal statistical analysis, are few and far between—generally limited to specific domains of professional life. Much of the time, even at work, we are drawing on the vast accumulation of personal anecdotes and narrative that amounts to our life experience. Ethnographic intelligence is about becoming reflexive, self-aware and deliberate about this kind of knowledge—and about creating methods through which it might be reliably and credibly applied to the problems one must work through as a professional. And although ethnographic intelligence may be developed through the use of new tools like the deliverables described in this case study, it is also about inducing a perspective shift in the kind of knowledge that is admissible and legitimate in the formal contexts of knowledge work. Concrete tools can help to do this by imparting the sense of system and order that often serves as an indicator for credible knowledge work practices.
Elevating Ethnographic Knowledge Work
Identifying epistemological frictions and transforming the para-ethnographic methods that often accompany them into ethnographic intelligence allows us to accomplish two important things. First, as I have demonstrated, it allows us to create value for our clients and colleagues by helping to solve problems that are important to them. Second, as I will elaborate more fully here, these frictions are opportunities that provide traction (Anderson and Cury 2023) for intervention by professional ethnographers in a way that enhances the legitimacy of our kind of knowledge work.
Qualitative experts may often be tempted to go on the offensive to critique technical-rational epistemologies. This is all too easy for anyone with a critical social science background. It is also unlikely to be productive in a professional context, not only by putting potential collaborators on the defensive, but because many professionals are in fact already well aware of the limitations of hegemonic business epistemologies and the frictions these entail. They already experience the misalignments between legitimate and useful knowledge and work pragmatically around them. Often, they can anticipate the social scientist’s critical interpretations—and find them perhaps interesting, but not really useful (see Riles 2010, 10). Social scientists should be careful to not take for granted the degree to which modern subjects do not simply interpret their worlds as natural, but appreciate the complex and constructed nature of epistemologies, discourses and ideologies—even as their response may be more pragmatic than theoretical (e.g. Sloterdijk 1983; Yurchak 2005; Eyre 2022).
Helping other professionals develop ethnographic intelligence in a way that has practical utility, and which elevates the status of a domain of their knowledge work previously regarded with ambivalence, is likely to be a far more rewarding approach for all parties. It strengthens the credibility not only of our own expertise, but the credibility of ethnographic methods and qualitative knowledge work practiced by professionals more broadly. As the proliferation of ESG analysis has led companies to adopt a more context-sensitive “lateral vision” (Tett 2021), so ethnographic intelligence might further push the wedge to create even more room for diverse methodological and analytical approaches in business.
About the Author
Sakari Mesimäki is a social anthropologist and consultant. His academic research has explored the worldmaking agency of Finnish startup professionals, Tokyo creatives seeking to “rebrand” political participation, and masculinities in a Japanese university dance society. His consulting practice applies an anthropological sensibility to challenges in fields including communications, design and finance. Contact at sakari@mesimaki.me.
Research Ethics
Research was conducted according to the principle of continuous informed consent. Interlocutors were informed about their role in the project, anonymization practices, and their right to determine their level of participation in an initial introductory presentation and follow-up email. These were reiterated and discussed further when carrying out individual interviews to ensure understanding and agreement. Project deliverables were created with the direct collaboration and input of interlocutors. Tesi has given permission to discuss this case study with reference to the company.
Zaloom, Caitlin. 2003. “Ambiguous Numbers: Trading Technologies and Interpretation in Financial Markets.” American Ethnologist 30 (2): 258–72.